Migrate from Bitbucket to Gitlab

Jan 10, 2017

Bitbucket has been my go-to solution for the side projects. Thanks to its generous
free plan with unlimited private repository, I can happily hack in the dark
without worrying about the scrutiny. The offering also includes basic bug tracking
and wiki atop. And did I mention that it also supports mercurial?

Why leave then?

Bitbucket’s code hosting is solid, but the web experience is quite lacking.
The code search is not supported,
nor the File Finder.
The UI is also aesthetically dull compared its competitors; though you may feel at
home if you are familiar with Atalassian’s flagship products, Jira and Confluence.

The last straw is the netlify integration issue:
the pull request fails to trigger a
preview build. To be fair, the bug
most likely sits in the netlify side; but it breaks my work flow so badly, that I’d
like to explore elsewhere to fix it.

The benefits of the migration is to keep the meta data, such as issues. And it is just easier:

After you sign up, in the Project dashboard, click the New projecet button, and you have
an option to import projects from Bitbucket:

The next step is the OAuth chanllenge from Bitbucket:

After the access is authorized, you may import some or all projects. It is worthy noting that
the mercurial projects can not be imported. And the
official mercurial to git migration guide
covers only the code repository conversion, the issues and wiki will NOT be migrated.

In couple seceonds, the project showed in the dashboard with high fidelity: